Customer Success Engineer

About the role

Element451 is the AI-native CRM and agent platform built for higher education. As we scale, we're building the technical layer behind Customer Success—so AMs can move faster, escalations resolve quicker, and customers get confident answers.

Responsibilities

• Implementation-to-CS Handoff Quality

• Partner with Implementation at the close of onboarding to review handoff artifacts
• Flag anything that needs resolution before CS takes full ownership
• Participate in handoff calls when complexity warrants it
• Proactively identify configuration risks or adoption blockers that could become retention issues and escalate them to the right internal owners

• Technical Enablement

• Serve as the primary technical resource for the AM team
• Coach AMs on platform fundamentals, AI agent logic, and integration concepts
• Build and maintain internal enablement assets

• Technical Discovery & Solutioning

• Lead technical discovery on post-go-live needs
• Translate vague pain into concrete requirements and a recommended approach
• Facilitate technical working sessions with Enrollment Ops and IT stakeholders
• Produce lightweight solution artifacts

• Escalation Triage & Resolution

• Own technical escalations from CS
• Diagnose platform, configuration, and workflow issues
• Drive resolution — often without Engineering involvement
• Coordinate with Support and Engineering on issues that require product-level investigation
• Translate technical findings into clear updates so AMs can keep customers informed

• Platform Fluency & Best Practices

• Maintain deep fluency across Element451
• Document best-practice patterns for common higher ed use cases

• Cross-Functional Contribution

• Connect across CS, Implementation, Support, and Product
• Identify systemic issues and propose fixes that scale
• Contribute to a durable knowledge base

• AM & CSE Relationship

• Support the AM in their client relationships
• Step into client conversations when technical depth is needed

Requirements

• 4–7 years in a technical, customer-facing role in B2B SaaS — Customer Success Engineer, Technical Account Manager, Solutions Consultant, or an implementation-adjacent CS role
• Direct experience with a higher education CRM and the workflows it supports — Element451, Slate, Salesforce Education Cloud, Ellucian CRM Advance, TargetX, or similar strongly preferred
• Strong technical discovery skills: you can move from vague pain to concrete requirements to a recommended approach without losing the room
• Deep command of CRM configuration thinking: objects and fields, segmentation logic, workflow and journey design, and reporting implications
• Enough integration and API literacy to diagnose symptoms, speak credibly with IT teams, and understand what's happening in a broken data sync — you don't need to build integrations, but you must understand them
• Excellent communicator who can make technical concepts accessible to non-technical audiences — AMs and institutional administrators alike — without losing precision
• Coaching mindset: you get energy from making the people around you more capable, building reusable assets, and reducing dependency over time
• High ownership and reliability across a shared portfolio — when a AM escalates something to you, they trust it will get handled